Our first album, Manic Fever (2023) was the product of an unintended long gestation period due to the pandemic, whereas “Slimephone Surveillance” is an urgent product of these fucked up times we’re living in. The social climate, the political climate… the environmental climate. There isn’t a lot of good news these days, it's getting harder and harder to keep your chin up. It is about losing hope, the sad animalistic primitive nature of humans, technology’s influence on how we connect with one another, coveting the life of movie stars + influencers and trying to manage/navigate our complex human emotions/everyday life during these fucked up times. I think the album definitely has a more...I don't want to call it a concept record, because it isn't, but there is certainly a more specific connective tissue this go round, whereas I feel like the first album was more of a collection of songs.
Musically, as a songwriter, I’m pretty influenced by punk acts like The Wipers or The Rats, but try to filter those influences through modern garage leanings of acts like Thee Oh Sees or Jay Reatard. Though, people have told me that we sound like “an angrier Buzzcocks.” I don’t particularly hear that, but I’ll take it.
Sonically, I really wanted this album to have a different identity than the first album. There are more guitar and vocal overdubs, which in the mixing process allowed us to pan things out and give this album more of a stereo or “hi-fi” feel. That said, this was still recorded in the basement where we practice, so it is by no means a big slick record. The base of the recordings is the three of us playing together live in room, no click tracks.
So, you’re getting the natural intensity of the band as we are live, just with some studio flourishes. My right hand man in the recording process is Ian "Prince Fletcher" Williams (Of the phenomenal surf group "The Surf Zombies"), he is kind of like the band’s fourth member, in that regard. After my obsessive overdubs at home, he really is a huge part of the mixing process and making the final product appropriately cook
RECEPTION
The opening song on the album, I think it kind of sets the tone. It is about where we are right now as a planet and a species. Everyday you turn on the news and it is just getting worse and worse. We’ve lost touch with our humanity. It's hard to have hope. I don’t think this is a hard one to understand. I actually wrote the lyrics for this the day I recorded the vocals.
ANIMAL
This one is told from the perspective of a not so nice person who is stalking someone. They don’t see the value in their prey/victim. I sometimes think of lyrics to songs in a similar way as inkblot tests. I like the idea of things meaning different things to different people. I had one person ask me if this is about a serial killer, I’ve had other people ask me if this is about what we have happening in this country currently with ICE. Take it however you want.
SLIMEPHONE (YOU CAN’T HIDE)
This song is about the way we’ve assimilated with technology. We’re so in love with our smartphones that we’ve willingly given away our privacy and our autonomy… in most cases to corporations who are just data mining our lives to figure out what they can sell us.
With social media, we allow our every waking move to be monitored by big tech, strangers, ex-lovers, family, friends, etc. I think about cyber stalkers a lot… the way tech has enabled weirdos to know the ins and outs of someone's life intimately, even if they’ve never met them IRL, as the kids say. It's scary shit and don’t feel like a lot of people give enough thought into how weird it really is. We’re complacent with our loss of solitude.
BILE BLASTER
Ever have someone you care about in your life suddenly lose it and become a completely different person? We knew someone who kind of self destructed their own life and point blame at everyone that cared about them for being the root cause, which was definitely not the case. Anywho, that is what this one is about. This and “Exoteric” were the first two songs recorded for the album, as they were originally going to be on a split with another band, but that band called it a day, so the split never happened.
VIOLENT HUES
A song about self harm. Getting to a point where it is hard to resist the voices in your head and you just pray they’ll shut up. I wrote this one while writing songs for our first album, “Manic Fever,” but thought it felt too much like a couple other songs on that album. “Nothing,” “Waste Away” and “Violent Hues” are a trilogy of sorts. I’m really happy with the way this recording turned out. It's pretty easy to get sick of your own songs, but I like this one.
ROOM
This is actually the second time we’ve recorded this song. “Room” was on a seven inch we put out back in 2019 and has been a staple of our live set ever since. I’ve always thought the recording was way too slow. I’m always pushing Jill and Hutch to play our songs faster and after years of jamming “Room,” it's been cooking live. Since people love the song and the seven inch has been out of print for years… seemed like the song deserved to be captured in its current form and have a final resting place on an album. It is about love and lies.
EXOTERIC
This is legitimately the only like… LOVE song in the Mall Cops catalog. Don’t let the dumb lyrics fool you, this is a sincere song about the world being awful, but finding solace in the one you love.
YOU MAKE ME SPIN
What does this song mean? It's about when you just lose it. A situation or interaction or person or whatever that just makes you break… that makes you… “spin.”
FERNWEH
I’m a big movie nerd. I watch a lot of films and even have a horror movie podcast I do with some friends. I watch movies as a way to cope, as I am sure plenty of others do.
Real life isn’t like the movies. It's messier… uglier. This song is about yearning for a more idealized movie like life. So, after all the ugliness of the record, it is kind of like… throwing your hands up and saying, “I want a different life.” But let's be real, the grass isn’t always greener. We don’t need to be coveting stars and influencers, because at the end of the day… its smoke and mirrors.
YOUR QUIET CHARM
A song for my childhood best friend who passed away unexpectedly. This song was written in the moment that is the recording you hear on the album. It was a rare stream of consciousness moment. I sat down and played the verse riff once, thought it sounded cool, so I went to record a “note to self” and the whole song just poured out of me. That initial performance felt so pure and didn’t seem like it could be recaptured, so I recorded overdubs on it to kind of hide the imperfections of that initial performance and make it feel… complete. A different flavor of song for our band, for sure. The album ends with the loss of innocence and reflections of times gone.
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